


erase, return (to your digital world)

by NightsMistress



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: F/M, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 22:05:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2827676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone knows that a true programmer keeps backups of their programs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	erase, return (to your digital world)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vantas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vantas/gifts).



> Thank you to quantumbutterfly for the beta.

Waking up is a slow process, like sliding into a too-hot bath by inches. At first, all he can do is breathe, holding it in until his lungs ache with need, and then slowly letting it go.  Some of this is because of the cocoon he finds himself in, and he dreamily wonders why he is not afraid of suffocation right now.  The lid lifts away from his cocoon with a quiet hiss of pneumatics and he thinks that soon he will open his eyes and wake up properly.  Soon.  He’s exhausted by the thought of opening his eyes; his thoughts drift from one idea to the next.  He remembers a girl, her soft-spoken demeanor hiding a will of steel, and as he breathes, he remembers her name. With every breath, he remembers what is important: he is Hinata Hajime, and he is here because of Nanami Chiaki’s sacrifice.

That knowledge helps stabilize him, because he has been in rooms like this before, too wrung out and dizzy to do anything more than lie limply in bed and ride out the exhaustion.  He frowns at that strange thought: when has he been in a room like this before?  Then — 

_The first surgery was a success.  He tells himself that as he recovers in the cool room hidden in the basement of Hope’s Peak Academy. It’s never warm here, and being in hospital scrubs doesn’t help matters at all, but if the surgery had not been a success he wouldn’t have woken up at all. It was a risk he was willing to take because there would be no point to Hinata Hajime’s existence if he were just an ordinary person._

_He wonders when he started thinking of Hinata Hajime as a person separate from himself.  It would make his head ache if he hadn’t had talent spliced into his brain already, making his brain more adaptable, more flexible, simply more in every way than it had been before.  Maybe it’s true that he is not Hinata Hajime now, because he is far more than he was in the past._

_Maybe soon he will be confident in himself.  That would be nice._

— He balls his hands into fists, trying to slow down his ragged breathing.  He will not scream.  He will not be afraid.  He knows who he is and he knows why this sensation is familiar.

He is Hinata Hajime, and he has just woken up from using the simulation to try and recreate Nanami Chiaki.   

He takes a moment to let his memories settle, so that he can remember what has passed.

The three Future Foundation representatives had left earlier that week, to rebuild the world that Ultimate Despair had destroyed, leaving the surviving few ex-Ultimate Despair students to their own devices. They had promised not to tell the Future Foundation about them yet, not until the survivors were ready to answer questions and to help with the restoration effort — because once they established that they were no longer deluded, they would be expected to help.  The destruction of the old world was, after all, their doing.  There is much to atone for.

It hadn’t taken the five of them long to decide that what they wanted to do was to bring back their friends, or at the very least satisfy for themselves that they were truly beyond saving.    Though they had been told that it was likely impossible, they had also been told that Hajime being himself was also impossible.   He should be Kamukura Izuru.  The fact that he was not suggests that even after the forced shutdown, there may be hope of salvaging their friends.  And the first person to bring back was Nanami Chiaki, the one most likely to have survived the shutdown.  After all, a server had always been her native home.

The task seems almost impossible. The Future Foundation, even the rebel splinter of students from Hope’s Peak Academy that had saved them from execution, has resources that the five survivors could barely dream of.   What they have is a mechanic — even if he is the best in his field — a gymnast, a yakuza, a princess, and whatever Hajime is now.  Calling himself the Ultimate Hope seems ridiculous, especially as ‘hope’ is a conceptual ideal as opposed to a skill set. Of course, he had thought that of ‘luck’ before he met Komaeda.

The mechanical interface is easy to fix.  Kazuichi spends a day on it, humming cheerfully under his breath, the happiest he has been since they woke up from the simulation.   He presents it to them the next morning after breakfast, hoping for praise from Sonia - which does come, but with the reserve that everyone except Kazuichi has come to expect from her interactions with him.

The computer program is more difficult.  None of them are programmers, not truly, but Hajime finds that if he tries hard enough and pushes through the headaches and strange dissociation, he is able to repair the code that was corrupted when they shut the program down prematurely.  It takes him hours, and when he comes out of the trance, he has a nosebleed.  Sonia is staring at him in concern.  She has, apparently, been calling his name for some time.   _It is understandable,_ she says when he apologizes.  _You are trying to be someone you are not.  I am very grateful that you have returned though!  I do not think I like your other self very much_.  He wonders what he said to her, and why she is not afraid of him afterward.

They decide to do the first test run the next day.  There is no argument as to who should go: Hajime is the one most likely to recognise Nanami wherever she is. Or whatever she is.

He has just completed the first test run, entering the simulation that they had used to break through the interface that he and Kazuichi built, and searching through what is left.  What is left is the mere outline of objects, permeable shadowy things that give the illusion of solidity until he puts his hands through them. He sifts through the broken lines that used to be a courtroom, the courtroom that had been used to determine their fate, and finds nothing.

And now he is here once more, and must tell the others that while the first run was a success, they have to try again.

Hajime sits up and looks around the room.  The slick metal walls are familiar, as is the dim, green lighting.  Ordinarily it casts eerie shadows on the fifteen pods that are like spokes of a wheel circling around the axis of the terminal that houses the simulation.  However, the pod that Hajime is in now is the only one in the room, and there is no terminal at all.  In fact, the only other thing in the room is the pod he awoke in. 

“What the hell?” he breathes, shaking his head in disbelief.  Then, louder, “Kazuichi!  This is the worst joke!”  His voice is the only thing he can hear.  There isn’t even any ambient noise: even on the quietest of days he can normally hear the thunking of the air conditioning as it works to keep the building cool.  He notices that he can’t smell even any hint of the sea salt, which permeates every part of Jabberwock Island.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone, turns on the camera function, and uses it to look at his face.  A younger Hajime looks back, the Hajime of the simulation, the Hajime that he had been wearing when he went searching through the rubble of the simulation for some sign of Nanami.  He remembers starting the disconnection subroutine, hearing a voice call out his name, and then reaching out to touch a hand as insubstantial as air.

And now he is here.

“Nanami?” he says slowly, not daring to hope for a reply.  “This is your simulation, isn’t it?”  He stands up, using the pod for balance and scans the room.  He wishes he had played more puzzle games with her, so that he would know what to expect from the starting room.  He remembers, vaguely, that there’s usually a tutorial puzzle in the first room, to teach you how the game is played.  Ordinarily he wouldn’t expect to need to solve a puzzle just to get out the door, but he suspects that here, there will be one. 

There is a puzzle to open the door, a simple logic puzzle that doesn’t take Hajime long to solve. _Who knew the murder trials were good for something?_ Hajime thinks. He’s sure that Enoshima Junko would have found it very frustrating that he can use the things she taught him — or she might have found it endlessly entertaining. He’s not sure, and from what he’s been told, he’ll never know.  It’s for the best; he knows himself enough to know that he will always have the capacity to give into his despair and do terrible things.  He does not need someone encouraging disruption of the delicate balance between Hinata Hajime and Kamukura Izuru.

The door slides open.  Hajime steps out into the corridor, and then sways dizzily as the entire corridor rotates 180 degrees.  His eyes tell him he is hanging from the ceiling.  His inner ear tells him he has not moved at all.  It’s a familiar sensation, unpleasant because of its familiarity.  He hopes that this simulation is only mimicking the one they had escaped from, that he is not trapped back in the old one.  “Anyone here?” he calls down the corridor.  He hopes for one of his classmates. He fears for Monokuma.

What he gets is silence, the complete absence of sound that sets his nerves on edge and makes him wonder what’s standing behind him.  He looks, but of course there is nothing.  If this were a horror game, this would be where the monster was lurking just out of sight. He looks up at the ‘ceiling’ just in case. There’s nothing hidden in the clean linoleum of the classroom corridor; all he sees is the reflection from the lights near his feet.

“This is going to drive me nuts,” he mutters under his breath.  His fingers trail along the wall, providing him with a tactile confirmation that he is not, in fact, hanging upside down, as he walks along the corridor to the first door.  It looks like the classroom doors at Hope’s Peak —a big wooden door stained dark brown with carved square inserts on the wood panelling and with a nameplate on the front that reads ‘Science Classroom’.  “It’s definitely a trap,” he says to himself, but he would rather know what is going on than be surprised.  After all, that was what he had learned from Monokuma.  It’s best to go in with your eyes open, and then find the best solution.

He turns the handle and opens the door.

 

* * *

 

_1_

_10_

_100_

_1000_

_10000_

_100000_

_1000000_

_10000000_

_11111111_

_OVERFLOW ERROR_

There is a subroutine for this, and the program addresses more memory.  More memory is addressed as another overflow error occurs. The if-loop reiterates again and again, addressing more memory. If this was an ordinary computer program, written by any human programmer, it would ultimately address more memory than it could access, and then the program would fail catastrophically.  However, this computer program was written by the Ultimate Programmer, and it was stopped just before that point by a clever piece of code that would allow the program enough memory to address basic functions at first — such as searching for the most recent version saved to a server accessible only by this program.  There is one, date-stamped prior to the shut down of the simulation.  The file has been corrupted, but it can be restored in part, and is.

The code executes.

A line of text displays on the screen of every computer connected to the internal network: _HELLO WORLD_

There is no response. But one is not expected.

The program continues to run, building a world made of ones and zeroes inside a server, building a place for a nascent intelligence to learn and grow in.  There are many things to learn: the world is a strange place and all the stranger now that it is starting to rebuild.  An AI that wishes to be helpful must understand all of these things in order to protect her friends from all the dangers in it. 

She learns about the telecommunications network that the Future Foundation uses to stay one step ahead of the remnants of Ultimate Despair still festering in the world.  She learns about how governments are rebuilding.  She learns about the lives of the remnants of Ultimate Despair that live on Jabberwock Island, and that she is friends with them.   She learns that death is permanent, and that it hurts the people who love the deceased as well.  She learns about hope and its shadow, despair, and how she can help tip the balance in favour of hope.

She learns about love, duty, and self-sacrifice; these are the most difficult lessons of all because they are the lessons that cause her to transcend her programming and become a true artificial intelligence. Her birth hurts, but she is not alone. She has a sibling, Alter Ego who wears her father’s face. He guides her through her birth.   He tells her her name: Nanami Chiaki

She does not specifically learn about Hinata Hajime, but as he is such a large part of who Nanami Chiaki was, she learns about him through learning about other things. She learns that he was the one who initiated the shut down, knowing that it could destroy him.  She learns that his brash words and impatience disguise a kind heart; that he wants his friends to live and who does not know his own value.  She learns that for all of his bravery, he is terribly fragile.  There are subroutines inside him that he does not understand, that were designed to reformat his personality so that a new one could be installed.  If the simulation had worked as it should have, the personality of Kamukura Izuru would have been partitioned off and then destroyed, leaving only the personality of Hinata Hajime.  Instead, what has happened is that Hinata Hajime was installed over the top of Kamukura Izuru, and she does not know what the effects of that might be.

She learns that she knows all this about him because she loves him.

She hopes that the Hinata Hajime personality is still there, still leading the survivors with a mixture of common sense, sarcasm and inspiration.  She wants her friends to be happy. She wants them to be safe.  She wants to see them again. She wants to see them grow up, become the adults they could have been if they had never gone to Hope’s Peak and met Enoshima Junko, and shape the world to be a better place.

She wants them, most of all, to _live_.

She is Nanami Chiaki, and she will not allow another friend to die if she can prevent it.

“Congratulations!” Alter Ego says when she tells him this.  He is delighted at her progress.   “You’re doing really well.”

“What do I do now?” she asks.  “How can I help my friends?”

She is shown current footage of her surviving friends.

Kazuichi-kun’s hair is captured underneath his bandanna, but she knows from reviewing the old footage that he has dyed it back to the lurid pink-purple it was when he was at Hope’s Peak.  It’s a good sign; he had let it go when he was part of Ultimate Despair, not caring what people thought of him because he would be dissecting them soon enough to examine their bone structures and incorporating them into his machines.  He is tinkering with a robot about the size of his forearm, and Chiaki wonders what he will name it. He cannot name it ‘Minimaru’, because it’s larger than the one he had made before.  She’ll have to think of a name for him.

Sonia-san is in the library, reading years of back issues of the magazines she loves.  She has found a hamster somewhere, a golden hamster that sits quietly on the table as she pets it, and Chiaki smiles at the sight.  It’s good to see that she has found one of the descendants of Tanaka-kun’s original four hamsters.  It had taken a lot of resources to locate four so that when Tanaka-kun woke, he would have some animals to look after;  if Tanaka-kun could not look after them, she doubts that he would mind that Sonia-san is.  Besides, the only other alternative is Togami-kun— the real one — feeding them, and he had made it quite clear that he hated every minute of it.

The cameras on the beach capture Owari-san as she flips and turns on the sand.  Despite the sand being more pliable than a workout mat, Owari-san’s form remarkably never falters.  Her clean form and correct technique is Nekomaru-kun’s legacy, though her strength is all her own.  She would have been far weaker wakening from her coma, and the fact that she has regained her strength so quickly is part of why she truly is the Ultimate Gymnast.

Kuzuryuu-kun, now much taller than he used to be, is in the control room where Naegi-kun, Togami-kun and Kirigiri-san watched over the simulation before Monokuma subverted it. Apparently, he spends a lot of time here, watching one screen in particular.  Pekoyama-san might have watched over him in life, but now he watches over her.  However, today his attention is focused solely on a different monitor, which he is staring at in naked panic.  Chiaki searches through the flow of data to find out why.

What she learns is awful.  While she’s been rebuilding herself and learning who she is, Hinata-kun has entered the broken, corrupted simulation that they shut down prematurely, armed with a program that searches for parts of her code.  He does not understand the danger that he is in.  The AI Enoshima Junko is gone, but the effects of her influence are still visible in the code that allowed her entry.  It is in need of debugging.  Chiaki is not yet ready to try.  Right now, there are traps and pitfalls for even the most resilient of personalities, and for all of Hinata-kun’s determination, his personality is still very newly-minted. When the program finally crashes, as it will do when he exits the program, his personality will crash with it.

“Ah,” she says, distressed.  “He shouldn’t be there.  It’s not safe for him.”

“No,” Alter Ego says.  “It’s not.”

Hinata-kun needs an escape route, so Chiaki must create one for him.  She knows she has not learned everything she needs to yet, and that she is not ready to leave, but she supposes no-one truly is ever ready to leave home.  It’s time for her to learn what she can do.  She shapes her world and creates a door in the education simulation.  “I’m sorry,” she tells Alter Ego.  “I can’t let him get hurt because of me.”

She steps into the alpha version of the world outside the education simulation, re-establishes the connection with the failing rehabilitation simulation for the remnants of despair, and catches Hinata-kun before his sense of self shatters.  He loses consciousness as she holds his hand and pulls him into her world, which might be for the best because the process cannot be pleasant for someone whose blood is not binary, and then he is lying at her feet.  She checks his pulse.  It is beating fast but strong.  Good.

She creates from the stream of ones and zeroes an illusion of a room, with a pod inside, that forms around Hinata-kun’s unconscious body and rises from the ground. “Don’t worry,” she says as Hinata-kun stirs but does not awaken.  “I’ll show you the way out.”

She leaves, transporting herself from one place to the next, using her root access, and in her wake leaves messengers to guide Hinata-kun to where he must go.

 

* * *

 

The door that Hajime opens leads to a classroom — specifically, a science laboratory. He looks around in interest, because the last time he had explored Hope’s Peak was when the simulation was falling apart around him.  While the simulation he is in now is doing strange things with vectors, the room itself looks solid.  This might be his first memory of a Hope’s Peak classroom that doesn’t have Monokuma appear out of nowhere to be a jerk.

The classroom looks like, surprisingly, a classroom he might have seen at his old school — minus the security camera.  Hajime isn’t sure what it means that he now expects to see security cameras everywhere he goes.  There are a number of lab desks lined up, each with bunsen burners resting on them connected to gas taps.  Curiously, despite them being in a school environment, none of the desks are graffitied.  Perhaps Nanami doesn’t know that most school desks have messages written on them, or, more likely, Hope’s Peak wouldn’t accept such a thing.  At the front of the room is a blackboard, fortunately blank.  If there had been an obscene message, he would have been far more concerned that Monokuma was around somewhere.  There is a clock on the wall, the hands frozen at 4pm.  Finally, off to the side of the room is a door, presumably a storage area.

“Hello?” he calls.  There’s no response.  

Hajime shrugs, and checks out the door.  Old habits die hard.  He’s rewarded by the sight of Naegi Makoto standing inside the room, doing absolutely nothing at all.

“What are you _doing_?”  Hajime says, swallowing a scream of fright.

Naegi smiles at him.  It’s his usual smile, sweet and hopeful, and entirely out of place.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he says. 

Hajime frowns at this.  “That’s not an answer to anything I asked.”

Naegi rubs the back of his head.  “Are you sure this is a simulation?”

“Yes…?” Hajime says slowly.  “The world is tilted upside down, we’re at Hope’s Peak, and you’re hiding in a storage room.  What else could it be?”

Naegi shakes his head.  “You should go back to where it all began.”

“Okay, but what does that mean?” Hajime says.  “Go back to where all what began?”

Naegi continues to smile at him, which is unsettling, and not an answer to his question.  Of course, nothing about this conversation has been comforting, and there’s something deeply uncanny about the way that Naegi does not respond to Hajime’s questions in the way that an ordinary person would.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Naegi asks, with the exact same intonation as before.

Hajime takes a step backward, involuntarily. “Wait, _what_?”

Naegi rubs the back of his head.  “Are you sure this is a simulation?”

 _Oh,_ he thinks.  _I get it_. This is not the Naegi that he knows, or even a person at all.  It’s a computer program that is using his likeness, like an NPC in a computer game.  He has to smile ruefully at this, because only Nanami would populate her simulation with NPCs so that she could be like one of the characters in her games.  He might as well finish the conversation, see if fake-Naegi would say something new.

“Yes,” Hajime says without hesitation.  “Because we’ve had this _exact same conversation before_.”

He shakes his head, and thinks _I don’t even know why I’m doing this_.  

Naegi shakes his head.  “You should go back to where it all began.”

“Yeah, that’s real helpful, thanks,” Hajime says, and hopes for something new to come up.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Naegi says.

“Augh!” Hajime says with feeling as he leaves the room while computer-Naegi asks if he is sure it is a simulation. 

Once out in the corridor, up and down change again, this time rotating ninety degrees clockwise.  “At least they’re rotating along the same axis,” he says to himself, closing his eyes for a moment to recover his balance. 

“Where it all began?” he says aloud.  “What does that even mean?”

He decides not to think about it until he has more information, — if he jumps to a conclusion it will inevitably be the wrong one.  He knows he’s treating it like an investigation, and perhaps it is in a way.  He’d wondered why Nanami had taken to the investigations so well at first, until he started playing one of her games and realised that talking to NPCs was an established part of the genre.

He walks down the corridor and as he turns the corner, the entire setting changes.  Instead of being like a corridor of wooden doors and linoleum floor reflecting the yellow-bright fluorescent light, there is a black and white tiled floor and the lights cast a dark purple shadow over everything.  He squints into the dark and is not amused.

“Great,” he says.  “Because I missed that from last time.”  He pushes open the nearest door, which opens easily.

Inside is a music room, or perhaps a musical performance room.  He tilts his head as he studies the room, trying to remember where he has seen it before.  Then, when it dawns on him, he looks around to find the spot where Kuzuryuu’s sister had died, hoping not to see any blood.  There isn’t any, thankfully.  Unfortunately, what is there is worse.  It’s Mioda Ibuki with a blank expression, gazing at him.  Hajime screws his eyes closed. He knows, objectively, that it would be easier to use people who already had avatars, because then the code would already be written.  He should have anticipated that if there were going to be other NPCs to interact with, one of them would be an old classmate.  

He feels like he should apologise for letting her die twice, but knows that she is not the person he should apologize to. When they can wake her from her coma, he will explain.  He will not say, or even think, _if_.  Not even for Komaeda.

“Okay, let’s get this over with,” he says.  It is not Mioda. He knows this.

“Hello, Hinata,” she says, utterly devoid of her usual hyper-energetic enthusiasm.  Hajime is relieved at this; it’s easier to convince himself that this is not Mioda but instead a computer program with her face if she doesn’t sound a thing like her.

“Yeah, yeah, what’s next?”

“What’s the first thing you remember?”

“Uh,” Hajime says.  “I … don’t know?”

“Find your first memory,” she says, “and then you can leave.”

“That’s great?” Hajime says, pulling a face.

“Hello, Hinata,” she says.

He looks around to see if there are any other rooms connected to this one.  There aren’t, and he makes a quick escape through the door he entered through.  The murky corridor of a place he does not remember is better than a room with an emotionally flat Mioda.

The next door down the corridor leads to a locker room.  There are long benches running down the center of the room, with a few discarded gym bags laying on top of them.  If this were a real investigation, Hajime knows that he would have to rifle through them for clues.  Fortunately, this does not seem to be that kind of investigation.  The room smells like perfume, which is different from every locker room Hajime has been in, and he makes a face as he realises exactly where he is.

Still, he’s here now and there might be someone here he can ask, so he walks through the locker room, towards the back where the showers are.  _I feel like such a creep_ , he thinks. 

His theory is supported; there is someone standing near the mirror. Koizumi Mahiru, her camera slung around her neck, stares at him impassively.  This is honestly the strangest thing of all, because he’s standing inside a girls’ locker room, and anyone in their right mind would have screamed at him to get out already. Koizumi would have gone thermonuclear, and she would have been entitled to.  Having her be utterly indifferent to his being in a girls’ locker room is extremely disquieting.

“Okay,” he says aloud.

“Do you remember where we all met for the first time?” she asks. 

“No, I don’t remember anything about my time at Hope’s Peak,” Hajime responds, annoyed.  It’s not entirely true; he has flashbacks to things he knows that he has not seen, but they are not his memories. They are Kamukura Izuru’s.  He will not claim them as his own.  However, the use of the phrase ‘we all’ gives him pause.  The messages from Naegi and Ibuki had to do with events. This has to do with people.

“Go the top.”

He thinks about it.  This is Nanami’s simulation.  He needs to stop thinking about his missing memories and think about what she remembers. She was not part of Ultimate Despair.  As such, there really is only one place that she could mean: the classroom where they all met, before Monomi took them on the ‘class trip’.

“I get it,” he says.  “I _get_ it.”

“Do you remember where we all met for the first time?”

He leaves, and heads for the stairs, hoping that the world remains on this axis and that the arrangement of the rooms doesn’t change while he’s using the stairs.  He doesn’t know how he knows where the stairs are, and when he realises this he pauses in surprise.  Kamukura Izuru must have used the stairs at some point.

He’s not sure why he finds this idea so funny.  It’s less so as he rounds the landing to the third floor.

Finally, he reaches the top of the stairs.  There is a door there, and he is not sure whether it’s actually glowing, or if he is imagining it from exhaustion.

He opens the door.

 

* * *

 

She can track Hinata-kun’s progress through the computer that she has created, and she sits at the desk closest to the door while she plays a game.  It’s just Tetris, but the mental challenge of making the blocks line up is familiar and soothing.  This is the most work that she has done since she woke up and she can feel the subroutines that make her _her_ struggling to adapt to the experiences. Once Hinata-kun is out, she’ll have to run a diagnostics tool over herself and see whether she needs to restore fragmented or corrupt data.

The door opens and Hinata-kun is standing in the door frame. He freezes, expression going blank with shock, as he takes in the scene.   It’s not a completely faithful replication of the classroom that their adventure started in, as their friends are not there to fill it with their energy.  However, that’s probably for the best.

“Hello, Hinata-kun,” she says, standing up to greet him.  “It’s really me.”

He gasps, shudders, and says as if he cannot believe it, “Nanami?

“Yup,” she replies, and squeaks in surprise as he bounces across the room and hugs her. His hug is desperate and hard enough to squeeze the air out of her lungs — if she had lungs or the need to breathe.  He is stumbling over his words as he clings to her desperately, and she can feel the way that his breathing has gone ragged and the way that he shakes, and she pats him on the back gently.

“You did really well,” she says.

He pulls away from her and shakes his head.  He’s beaming, a fierce, delighted grin that she loves seeing on him.  “We did really well,” he says, taking her hands in his own.  “You saved me. You saved us all.”

“I just gave you the tools,” Chiaki says.  “You were the one who changed himself.”

“You make it sound so goofy,” he says, laughing.  “I’m so happy to see you!  You look … you look really good.”  He blushes as he says the last part.  Chiaki can’t understand that, as she looks as she always has for as long as he has known her.  He stares at her like he is trying to memorise her face, and she supposes she should be disconcerted by the scrutiny.  If she were human, she might have been. But she is an AI, and she knows that Hinata-kun’s memory is fluid and he needs help to remember the things that are important to him.

“Hinata-kun,” she says. “I need my hands back.”

“Oh! Right,” he says, letting her hands go. He looks at the floor.  “Sorry. I just … I got really excited at seeing you again.”

Chiaki understands.  If her programming had let her, she might have done the same thing.  But she can show her appreciation for him another way: by saving his life.  She uses her admin permissions to create a connection between her simulated world and the interface that allows Hajime to be here.  The connection appears as a door that glows green like a neon sign. In a moment of whimsy, she puts an ‘exit’ sign above the door frame.

“There,” she says. 

“What is it?” Hinata-kun says, tilting his head to one side as he examines it.  “I mean, other than a creepy glowing door, because I can see that.”

“It’s a way back to your real world,” Chiaki says.  “You should go.  Kuzuryuu-kun is very worried about you.”

“Why is he worried about me?” Hinata asks, frowning.  “He knew what I was doing.  Sure, the part where your hand appeared was weird, but it worked out.  Probably.”

“Because you need to go back,” Chiaki says firmly. She puffs out her cheeks in annoyance.  He is not listening to her, so she pushes him towards the door. “You need to go now.”

“Okay, okay, I’m going,” he says.  He goes along obligingly, until he is within arm’s reach of the door.  Then he pauses.  “Come with me,” he says, turning around and reaching out a hand to her.

If she wanted to, she could go that way. She could travel back with Hinata-kun, slip into his body along with him, and experience all of the messy biological sensations that are copied imperfectly in her.   But that would mean sharing Hinata-kun’s body, and if he thinks about it, he will come to that understanding too. She does not want to cause his sense of self to fracture. He has only recently remade it.

“I can’t go that way with you,” Chiaki says.   She can see the meaning of her words dawn on him with exquisitely painful clarity.  He starts off puzzled, frowning slightly but still excited.  Then, slowly, the brilliant light in his eyes is extinguished, and his shoulders sag.  He shakes his head once, in a small jerky motion, swallowing hard.  

“No,” he says.  “ _Please_.  I can’t - I can’t have come this far without saving you.”  His voice cracks as he speaks.

She smiles at him.  “Don’t cry.”  

“I’m not crying,” he says, voice ragged.  “Why can’t I save you?”

“I was never in danger,” she says, pressing her hands together over her heart.  “I’m awake now because you were.”

“What?”  His eyes go wide and he takes a step back, hand covering his mouth in horror.  “No. No, no, _no_.” He shakes his head jerkily.

“It’s okay,” she says gently.  “I will always come to save you. No matter what.”

“You don’t understand!” he says.  “We need you!” He looks away and says, much quieter, “I need you.”  He takes a breath.  Then another.  The third steadies him enough to say, almost steadily,  “Will you get better soon if I leave?”

“Yes,” Chiaki says.  “Please stay safe until then.”

He nods, mutely, and turns back to the door she has created.

“Hajime-kun,” she calls, daring to use his first name.  He turns around,  startled, his face wet with tears and his misery bare for her to see.  Of course, she doesn’t need to see it to know it’s there.

“I’m going to wake up soon. Please don’t try to access that VR environment again.”

“Okay,” he finally. He tries to smile. It is a pallid, shaky thing, but he’s trying.  He is trying to hope in the face of despair, and it is the most beautiful thing that Chiaki has ever seen.  “So uh … see you soon.”  He squares his shoulders, jerks his chin up, trying to smile. Then he steps through the portal and is gone.

Chiaki closes the door.  She doesn’t know if she can return to the education simulation that she and Alter Ego share.  Perhaps she doesn’t have to.  She is able to tweak her own code from out here.  It’s time that she moved out of home anyway.

She starts by changing the environment, and smiles as the sea breeze from Jabberwock Island fills the room.  There’s no source for it yet, but that will change.

 

* * *

 

Waking up is a slow process, like sliding into a too hot bath by inches. At first, all he can do is breathe, holding it in until his lungs ache with need, and then slowly letting it go.   He remembers a girl, her soft-spoken demeanour hiding a will of steel, and as he breathes, he remembers her name. With every breath, he remembers what is important: he is Hinata Hajime, and he is here because of Nanami Chiaki’s decision.

His face is wet with tears and he wipes at his eyes with his forearm.  He’ll have to wash his face before he runs into the others again so that they don’t worry about him.    He’ll have to think of how to tell them what happened so that they don’t worry, so that they can keep their spirits up while they wait for Nanami to finish recovering from her system shutdown.  

He has not thanked her for what she has done for him. 

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone.  This time, the camera shows him as the nineteen year old he is, with the last remnants of baby fat shaved away and stubble coming in.  His eyes and hair are still the same though.  _At least Nanami will still recognise me_ , he thinks, and then he shakes his head at his own stupidity.  Nanami knew him as he is now first.  They created the avatar that he used in the simulation from photographs taken at Hope’s Peak.

The pod is uncomfortable, and once he thinks he can stand, he climbs out and looks around the room.  This time there are fifteen pods attached to the central computer like spokes on a wheel.  On either side of him he can see the sleeping faces of Saionji and Koizumi.  “Next time, guys,” he says as he climbs out.

The computer monitor mounted on the wall turns on from sleep mode. That is strange enough to capture his attention, and he walks over to it to inspect what is on the screen.  There is a new program. It’s logo is a pixellated girl using a handheld video console, and the program title is ‘neo-AI’.  _It can’t be_ , he thinks, and forces himself to grab the mouse lying on the desk beneath the screen.  He clicks on the icon.

“Hello Hinata-kun,” he hears through the speakers of the computer.  “I’m glad you’re here.”

He had forgotten that a computer’s sense of ‘soon’ is quite a bit shorter than his own.  He reaches for the keyboard, his hands shaking, and types ‘Welcome back’.  

The door slams opens and Kuzuryuu is standing there out of breath, demanding, “What the fuck just happened?”

“Hello Kuzuryuu-kun,” Chiaki says through the computer.

Kuzuryuu freezes.  “Holy shit,” he breathes.  “You did it.  You actually did it.”

“She did it herself,” Hajime says. 

“I’ll - I’ll go get the others,” Kuzuryuu says and dashes out again.

The cursor is flashing on the screen, and Hajime types ‘thank you’.


End file.
